Politics|In Bid to Inspire Faith in Senate, Kennedy Institute Has the Floor

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In Bid to Inspire Faith in Senate, Kennedy Institute Has the Floor

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Victoria Reggie Kennedy, the widow of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, in the recreated Senate chamber inside the $78.4 million Kennedy Institute. She and other family members were the driving force behind the new institute.CreditCreditGretchen Ertl for The New York Times

BOSTON — When creators of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate set out to rebuild the crumbling image of the world’s greatest deliberative body, they started from the ground up.

The new institute, which will be dedicated on Monday to the memory of the senator who spent nearly 50 years thundering from the Senate floor, has as its centerpiece a full-scale replica of the chamber, a re-creation startlingly authentic even to those who have spent countless hours in the real thing.

“I walked in there and I actually got a chill,” said former Senator Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican, who sits on the center’s board. “I thought, ‘I have been here before.’ ”

President Obama, the Kennedy family and former colleagues are scheduled to be on hand for ceremonies celebrating both Senator Kennedy and the center’s vision: to remind the public that an institution that today is known more for filibusters and dysfunction than bold leadership and stirring debate can again become a venue for finding national consensus.

To drive that point home, the $78.4 million combination museum and civics classroom will allow visitors to serve as senators in training in a Hollywood-ready facsimile of a setting that Mr. Kennedy saw as hallowed ground able to stir senators to overcome their political impulses to accomplish big things.

“He believed in the majesty of the place,” said his widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy. She, along with other family members, has been a moving force behind the institute, which Mr. Kennedy had a major role in planning before he died in 2009.

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The plaque that hung outside Mr. Kennedy’s Capitol Hill office sits on a desk in a replica of that office.CreditGretchen Ertl for The New York Times

The notion for the institute, adjacent to his brother’s presidential library, originated as Mr. Kennedy was pondering a possible post-Senate life. At a family birthday dinner in 2002, Edwin Schlossberg, a designer who is married to Caroline Kennedy, the senator’s niece, presented him with a rough drawing and an idea for a facility that would represent more of a political learning experience than simply an overview of the Senate.

“Senator Kennedy was so in love with being in the Senate,” Mr. Schlossberg said. He said his concept was to build a center that would not just “be a place to learn about the Senate but to learn about being in the Senate.”

The idea of reproducing the chamber took hold from there, and it became integral to the institute, which received significant support from Mr. Kennedy’s colleagues in Congress through $38 million in public funding over the years.

Built from the results of a three-dimensional architectural survey of the actual chamber, the institute’s version is not an exact replica. The rostrum occupied by the presiding officer is not raised in order to comply with accessibility standards, there is a prominent video screen and there are no busts of the vice presidents who have presided, to name a few variations.

But from many angles on the floor and from the visitors’ and media galleries, those differences virtually disappear, aided by the matching color scheme and carpeting, the familiar assembly of 100 specially made desks, the characteristic cloakroom and entry doors, the (faux) marbling and the padded staff benches lining the back walls. A designated desk to be filled with candy awaits just as in the actual Senate. The institute has even recorded the hubbub of the Senate voting, with calls for the Senate to be in order, to play for verisimilitude.

“It is an audacious idea,” said Bill R. DeWalt, executive vice president of the institute, about the re-creation. “But it works.”

It may work particularly well on Monday when Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the president of the Senate, presides over the dedication of the chamber with current senators on the floor — paired with college students from around the country.

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A majority of the exhibits in the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, which will be dedicated on Monday in Boston, are projected on the interior walls and are interactive with the use of a tablet.CreditGretchen Ertl for The New York Times

The institute also houses a re-creation of Mr. Kennedy’s office in the Senate’s Russell Building, complete with family photos and the tennis balls left for his ever-present Portuguese water dogs.

The chamber will be the setting for what the institute is calling immersion modules. In two-hour simulations, specially trained staff will lead up to 100 middle and high school students through their swearing in, hearings, legislative negotiations, debate and voting. The rules provide for a filibuster but one that, in this chamber, is limited.

Two case studies on immigration and the Compromise of 1850 have been developed, and staff said a third on the Patriot Act was being assembled with the assistance of Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and majority leader, through the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville. The idea is to show what goes into drafting legislation and the trade-offs required to get an outcome.

Mrs. Kennedy and other institute officials said that almost without exception in trial runs, restless students had immediately become serious upon entering the chamber and enthusiastically participated to a degree surprising to some of their teachers.

And while their parents might have become jaded about the abilities of Congress, members of the institute’s staff said it was not too late for younger Americans to learn how to tolerate an opposing point of view or how a compromise can be superior to solutions that do not accommodate competing outlooks.

Mr. Kennedy’s former colleagues say that is the legacy of the Massachusetts Democrat, who no doubt would have had something interesting to say about the Senate gridlock of recent years. They note that Mr. Kennedy, always one of the most liberal members of the Senate, was able to find a way to create landmark legislation with Republicans on such difficult topics as immigration, health care and education — a skill that seems almost lost in Congress today.

“There wasn’t anybody who felt more strongly about issues,” said former Senator Thomas A. Daschle of South Dakota, a Democrat and another member of the institute’s board who served with Mr. Kennedy. “He came to the floor to speak powerfully and emotionally in the strongest terms he could use to express himself. Having done that, he would reach out to the people on the other side.

“A lot of people take the first part of Ted Kennedy and go to the floor and express their strong views, but the second part is lacking,” Mr. Daschle said. “Ted Kennedy was remarkable in his ability to reach out to the most conservative people to find common ground.”

Correction:

An earlier version of this article provided the wrong given name for Caroline Kennedy’s husband. He is Edwin Schlossberg, not Edward.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: In Bid to Inspire Faith in Senate, Kennedy Institute Has the Floor. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe